Having grown up in the Soviet Union, Yevgenia Albats became a journalist and pro-democracy activist after the fall of Communism, and has also been involved in Jewish communal affairs. She is currently editor-in-chief of the New Times, one of Russia’s major opposition magazines. In an interview with Cathy Young, she recalls the anti-Semitism she faced as a child:

[E]veryday anti-Semitism was incredibly widespread in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, and anywhere [else], it was very easy to [hear the slur] zhidovskaya morda, [ “kikeface”] thrown at you. When we rode the tram or bus to school—my sister and I and another Jewish friend—we had a habit of looking around and finding the Jews. . . . They were people from whom we could expect protection. Why? Because one day when I was about nine, my sister and I were coming home from school and several girls in the yard of our building, who had been our playmates, jumped us and ripped off our Young Pioneer scarves, [symbolizing membership in the Communist-party youth movement], shouting, “You Yids have no right to wear Pioneer scarves.”

Years later, . . . I realized that it was the year of the Six-Day War. The Soviet Union had severed diplomatic relations with Israel, and the newspapers were full of talk about those evil Zionists. And there was, of course, a massive tide of anti-Semitism.

Nowadays, Albats comments, Jews seem safer in Moscow than in much of Western Europe. But she is concerned by the prominence of former KGB officers (whom she refers to as chekists, after the organization’s precursor) in the current government:

Of course, anti-Semitism was a very strong component of the KGB’s ideology. For the KGB, the Jews were a fifth column because they were people who finished Soviet universities and then took off for their “historical home,” always ready to sell out the Motherland. But today, until such time as the state signs off on it, this is going to be fairly muted.

Putin is not an anti-Semite; this is a known fact. But [some of his top allies] are. [T]he chekists devoutly believe in a global Jewish conspiracy and a world Jewish government. When they searched the offices of our magazine [in 2007 or 2008], the colonel who was in charge said to me, “I realize, Yevgenia Markovna, that you’re going to get the entire Jewish world on its feet. We know [Edgar] Bronfman is a friend of yours.” I may have met Bronfman twice in my life. But I never try to disabuse them of this notion. I tell them, “Yes, we run the world.” Let them believe it.

Unless there is a major change in the nature of the Russian regime, Albats believes that a resurgence of state-sponsored anti-Semitism is inevitable.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.